The Stereograph as an EducatorThomas J. Schlereth. Victorian America

At what many consider the first World's Fair, the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition, Queen Victoria expressed delight with a new "machine," the stereoscope. This medium had its first heyday in
the U.S. in the 1860s and 70s when the statesman Oliver Wendell Holmes created (and
deliberately did not patent) a streamlined, much more economical viewer than had been available before, featured on the left
(Darrah, 2). America's fascination with stereographs quickly
outweighed that of Europe's, perhaps in part because it fulfilled a middle-class desire for self-improvement and cosmopolitanism and possessed many of the benefits the "Grand Tour" offered at a much more affordable price (Darrah, 2).

Claims that there was a stereoscope
in every parlor in America came as early as the 1860s (Darrah, 2), but
in their second wave of popularity in the 1880s-1910s, the availability of
stereographs could be quantified: Underwood & Underwood, one of the
three major stereographic companies in this period, produced over 25,000
images per day (Darrah, 47), and an estimated 300 million stereographs were
issued between 1854 to 1920 (Wadja, 112). Selling at six for a dollar,
most stereographs captured the interest of middle class consumers, but a few
companies catered to the working class, providing similar views at 3 cents
a piece or 85 cents per 100 (DeLeskie, 69). Found in drugstores,
distributed through mail-order catalogs, given away as premiums by cereal
and tea companies, and canvassed cross-country by college students
(including a young Carl Sandburg), it is no wonder that many scholars consider the stereoscope as the first mass photographic medium prior to cinema or television (see Trachtenberg, Reading, 17).

Coinciding with the popularity of this new technology was an increasing
interest in visiting—and viewing—factories, especially in the early years
of the 20th century (Nye, 127). In 1900, for example, the Heinz Company
hosted 20,000 visitors at its plant in Pittsburgh (Nye, 113). Sometimes companies themselves sold
sets of "company tours"
(most notably Sears), but primarily major stereographic publishers did so, to
satisfy consumers' fascination with the "combination of complexity and
order they found in plants and mills" (Nye, 113). After 1905, Underwood & Underwood started packaging these tours in immitation book bindings, calling them the Underwood Travel System, reinforcing their connection with "edutainment" suitable for the whole family. Other stereographic companies followed suit.

Around the turn of the century, the stereoscope began to move, along
with education in general, from the parlor to the public school. Underwood
& Underwood and the other company with the widest distribution of the
period, the Keystone View Company, actively marketed sets of 600 or more
views to schools for instructional purposes. This shift also accompanied a
desire for more experiential education, promoted by educators such as John Dewey, which the stereoscopewhile
clearly a representative form of knowledgeclaimed to offer. Mass-market companies also recommended the stereoscope as a tool to convey the basic tenets of “economic geography,” a way of organizing and understanding the world
through its labor systems.

Along with the educational sets, the immensely popular “Tours of the
World” and “Underwood Travel System” as well as individually sold cards worked
to give Americans homogenized ways of seeing labor in America and
in foreign lands. In a time
of conflicting messages about industrialization and an increasing amount
of visual and statistical information, the “highly structured presentation
of visual and text-based information provided viewers with a familiar
framework with which to approach change” (DeLeskie, 121). Stereographs standardized the way images were constructed, what was worth looking at and how to look at images.
Although much of the praise for the stereograph's unique ability to portray reality came from stereograph manufacturers themselves, and thus remains a bit suspect, Holmes, in addition to creating an affordable viewer, did much to differentiate the stereograph from other forms of two-dimensional imagesspecifically painting here, but Holmes' emphasis on depth makes it applicable to non-stereoscopic photographs as well:

The first effect of looking at a good photograph through the stereoscope is a surprise such as no painting ever produced. The mind feels its way into the very depths of the picture. The scraggy branches of a tree in the foreground run out at us as if they would scratch our eyes out. The elbow of a figure stands forth so as to make us almost uncomfortable. (The Stereoscope and the Stereograph, 1859)

The stereoscope's distinctness was not always so apparent, so photographers enhanced the three-dimensional quality by using techniques such as long lines of perspective or circular borders (like a wreath, for example), around portraits. Methods of creating three-dimensional reality also resembled the composition of the "natural history
museum's habitat group with its sculpted foreground, less detailed
posterior foreground, and painted background. In fact, curator advice
articles and stereoscopic photographer trade magazines contained similar
tips on the use of at least three planes of vision" (Strain). The consciously
constructed cultural environment of the diorama appeared in even greater
relief with the three-dimensional stereographic image.

Since companies often reproduced negatives for decades, and
photographers distributed copies to multiple publishing
companies, the same images were likely to be seen numerous
times, reinforcing the other images and insuring consistency in what the
viewership saw (DeLeskie, 106; Darrah, 8). Publishers rarely identified photographers by name, and many companies seem to have followed Underwood's model for determining subject matter:

Perhaps long experience in what kinds of
pictures would sell led Bert Underwood [who spent many years as a
stereograph canvasser before he and his brother founded their company] to
a theory and practice in photography which became the standards which all
future photographers employed by Underwood were expected to follow
(Darrah, 47).

This standardization of the storehouse of visual images was
significant, as Jeb Fowles indicates: “For the first time in human
history, such a large proportion of a population was looking at an
extended but finite set of carefully produced secular images" (91).

In the process of naturalizing and standardizing a particular visual
perspective of the factory system for middle-class audiences, the viewer
was oriented further through various methods of recontextualization.
Viewing images through a stereoscope, typically with all periferal vision
blocked, gave one a sense of "being there," yet, as is the case with all
photographic images, the viewer was distanced from the subject (whether
they were machines or laborers), which became abstracted and objectified. Text, printed on the back of the cards, often accompanied stereographic sets, which oriented individuals within the scene geographically and culturally and thus mediated the ways in which they saw the image.
The stereoscope's presence in the parlor and the schoolroom domesticated and
authenticated it further, and comments by renowned scholars included with
the sets added to its authority. Underwood & Underwood and Keystone
View Company commonly inscribed text on the back of the cards or provided
companion booklets, which gave additional context for the images.
Geographical placement along with cultural commentary encouraged viewers
to come to specific conclusions, to come away from the viewing experience
with a common understanding of what they had seen.